Music Features

Each month, the editors and critics atRolling Stone compile a list of our favorite new albums. Our picks for Deceember include Taylor Swift‘s second amazing album of 2020, Playboi Carti‘s cathartic punk-loving rap and a covers LP from the late Chris Cornell. Paul McCartney, McCartney III Every decade should kick …

Listening to new music is part of everyone’s daily life at Rolling Stone, from the writers and editors in the music department to photographers, designers, researchers, copy editors, and more. That might have been truer than ever in 2020, a year when music became an essential source of comfort and …

In 1971, Peter Guralnick published Feel Like Going Home, which told the story of the blues through a series of revelatory profiles of Muddy Waters, Skip James, Howlin’ Wolf, and more. He ended the book with a goodbye: “I consider this chapter a swan song,” wrote Guralnick, who was 27 …

H ow you been, Mavis?” Chris Stapleton asks from Tennessee, where he lives. “I’ve been OK,” says Mavis Staples, who’s in Chicago. “My bass player sent me a puzzle of the whole band onstage. 500 pieces!” Staples, 81, is contending with her longest break since she started singing with the …

O n March 20th, 1995, country singer Cleve Francis convened a group of 14 artists, journalists, college administrators, branding experts, and music-industry workers for a special occasion — one of the first meetings of the Black Country Music Association. Francis began by stating the BCMA’s mission: to educate the public …

When Sebastian Bach arrived at rock photographer Mark Weiss’ wedding to sing at the reception, he knew he needed to give it his all. He was a then-unknown, 19-year-old singer with mile-high hair and a glass-shattering shriek, and by the time of the wedding — which took place in Red …

In the preface of the Contract With Black America that Ice Cube published in late August — amidst the ongoing global civil-rights uprising — professor and economist Darrick Hamilton wrote about what the 22-page document hoped to accomplish. Encouraged by the reinvigorated movement he’d seen around the world, Hamilton wrote …

Friday marks the 80th anniversary of John Lennon‘s birth. To celebrate, his family is releasing Gimme Some Truth. The Ultimate Mixes, a box set containing 36 songs from the late Beatle’s solo career, newly remixed from the master tapes. It was executive-produced by Yoko Ono Lennon and produced by Sean …

“Reason doesn’t walk in,” Van Morrison sang eight years ago. “Passion’s everything, when you were born to sing.” That line is from the title track of Morrison’s Born to Sing: No Plan B, an album whose name, in light of the singer’s recent tirades against government restrictions on live music …

B ruce Springsteen is standing on a gravel driveway outside his house, squinting up at the sky. This morning, an early-August thunderstorm straight out of one of his own metaphors rumbled through New Jersey’s Monmouth County, soaking Asbury Park, buffeting Freehold, leaving muddy ground here in the horsey acres of …